Hi again,

I'm here with some progress with my beloved game.

After getting painted some of the new assets and getting them into Unity, we realised that the contrast between background and foreground needed to be worked on as well as the ball mechanics / particle effect to reflect the life force that the players are playing with. 

Some colour overlay applied in Unity solved many of these problems. I also tried to use depth of field through Post Processing tool, but I was having trouble with it. It either applied blur to everything or nothing. So, for the blur, I will turn to the dear Photoshop instead for now.

The scenes where the background gets brighter and some more happening (plants, sun shining through) still need to be further enhanced - as I think there is still too much attention on the backgrounds. But at least it's something the games work a lot better with at the moment. Being also mindful with the time available, I will adjust them further in the future.

This is how the scenes look at this stage:

Even just looking at the pictures right now, I can definitely see that the second background needs to be further blurred and probably darkened as well. I don't want players to feel distracted by it or confused about where to focus. After all, it's a puzzle game with a nice story, but during gameplay you can't just look at the assets and think about the story, otherwise you'll lose the ball... 

A basic menu got also implemented - without art yet, but the basic functionality is there. Settings will have audio settings mainly, being able to control sounds and background music volume and turning them off completely.

I've got a new look for Mushin - the character. His look is still not complete as the wings and mostly the face needs adjusting. He has too tiny face compared to the big game area he's at. So, this little fella' is on my to do list for the next week.

I've also tweaked the life ball with particle system.  I wanted to have a real life energy ball like asset. I thought I'd need to create a basic globe in Photoshop and add particles in Unity, but I found some great particle effects that do the job really well by themselves.

An issue that I thought will need some more tweaking is that the ball looked very heavy when played - as an energy ball I don't really want that to look like.  By changing the asset itself through the particle system, it already looks way lighter than the old default 3D ball used.

Even though it's a simple game, this process just reminds me how important little details are and that never to underestimate game development. It's a complex process with lots of testing, changes, new tasks, planning, adjusting all the way through.

Weekly build available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vnY9au0Mn93VnVAKQ14-0F6nahlZ2UnB/view?usp=sharing